Its market value has shrunk by 78 billion yuan, and the "Diamond King" is about to be put up for sale.

An enterprise that has dominated the global diamond market for over a century is set to be sold.

According to Bloomberg, mining giant Anglo American is in exclusive acquisition negotiations with a consortium led by De Beers' former CEO, planning to sell its 85% stake in De Beers.

Under the structure disclosed by people familiar with the matter, the buyer will pay approximately 750 million USD (about 5.1 billion RMB) first, followed by another 250 million USD (about 1.7 billion RMB), while part of the consideration will be linked to the operating performance after the transaction is completed.

Meanwhile, the buyer also plans to inject about 500 million USD (about 3.4 billion RMB) of capital into De Beers. The fund will buy the 85% stake held by Anglo American. Back-calculating, the overall equity value of De Beers is approximately 1.18 billion USD, equivalent to just over 8 billion RMB.

In November 2011, when Anglo American bought the last 40% stake from the Oppenheimer family, it paid 5.1 billion USD, equivalent to about 34.7 billion RMB. That means the company's valuation at that time corresponded to 12.75 billion USD — 86.7 billion RMB. Fifteen years later, the upfront cash received is less than one-sixth of the original expenditure, with a total of 784 billion RMB evaporated.

Duncan Wanblad, Chief Executive of Anglo American, stated in a subsequent interview that the overall transaction has now entered the final stage, and he hopes to complete it within the year. The "Global Diamond Consortium" led by Gary Penney, former Chief Executive of De Beers, was selected as the preferred bidder in early July.

How did a company that wrote "A Diamond Is Forever" into weddings all over the world end up in a position of being sold at a fire-sale price?

A business that was invented

De Beers' origin is in Kimberley, South Africa.

In 1888, Cecil Rhodes integrated scattered local mining rights, and fought a lengthy acquisition tug-of-war with another mine owner Barney Barnato, finally winning by capital rather than mining technology. De Beers Consolidated Mines was thus established. From the first day of its founding, this company was not in the mining business, but in the business of controlling supply.

Ernest Oppenheimer was the one who turned this set of control tactics into a formal system. After he took charge of the company in 1929, he gradually established the Central Selling Organization: rough diamonds mined all over the world were gathered in London, and De Beers decided how much to sell, who to sell to, and at what price.

Buyers were screened into a list called "sightholders", who went to London to "view goods" on a regular basis. The goods were pre-packed and the prices were fixed. They could refuse, but the cost of refusal was losing the qualification for the next visit. This mechanism operated for more than half a century, relying on long-term relationships, institutional trust, and the delicate balance between quotas and prices.

With supply locked, demand was still missing.

In 1947, Frances Gerety, a copywriter at the advertising agency N.W. Ayer, wrote the famous line "A Diamond Is Forever". The power of this line does not lie in its literary grace, but in that it firmly binds a piece of carbon crystal with no practical value to marriage, a life ritual that almost everyone experiences; and the word "forever" implies that it should not be resold.

This strategy was later proven to be replicable. In the 1960s and 1970s, in Japan, a market that had almost no tradition of diamond rings, more than 70% of brides were made to wear diamond rings; later, the same path was repeated in China. By the 1980s, the company controlled more than 80% of the global rough diamond circulation, and the price curve of diamonds was basically the will curve of this company.

Cracks emerged in the 1990s. New mining sources in Russia, Australia and Canada successively bypassed London for independent sales, and anti-monopoly pressure also rose simultaneously in Europe and the United States. In 2000, the company abandoned the 70-year-old Central Selling Organization and turned to the marketing-driven "Supplier of Choice" model. A year later, together with the Oppenheimer family, it took the company private and delisted, with a valuation of more than 18 billion USD at that time, equivalent to 1.224 trillion RMB.

On November 4, 2011, the Oppenheimer family, which had controlled the company for 80 years, sold the last 40% stake and exited. Anglo American's shareholding rose to 85%, and the Government of Botswana held the remaining 15%.

A family can think on a time scale of decades, but a listed company that has to report performance to shareholders every six months usually cannot. This difference was not obvious at the time, but later appeared everywhere.

Four years, 784 billion RMB

What actually broke the valuation was something that happened in the laboratory.

Lab-grown diamonds are completely identical to natural diamonds in chemical composition, crystal structure and physical properties, and cannot be distinguished by the naked eye or conventional jewelry identification methods. When production capacity ramped up, prices collapsed extremely fast: the rough diamond price fell from nearly 100 USD per carat in early 2022 to the range of a dozen USD, with a cumulative drop of more than 80%; on the consumer side, the wholesale price of a 1-carat loose lab-grown diamond fell to as low as 1,800 RMB, about one-tenth of that of a natural diamond of the same specification. By 2025, among global diamond jewelry sales, the proportion of lab-grown diamonds has exceeded 40%, an increase of more than 8 times compared with 2019.

This is not a discount, but a complete re-pricing. Once the quality difference that supports the premium disappears, the price will not go back the way it came.

Changes in the Chinese market overlapped in the same time window: the number of people getting married was already in a downward channel, discretionary consumption was shrinking, and more subtly, young people's way of calculating accounts has changed. The statement circulating on social media is very straightforward: spend 10,000 RMB on a lab-grown diamond ring, and use the remaining money to buy 90,000 RMB of gold. In a few years, the value of gold doubles, while the diamond is "just for fun". The value-preservation narrative has been taken over by gold, and the reason that "it is worth spending a month's salary on it" has also loosened. The performance curve of DR, a domestic brand labeled as "only give to one person in a lifetime", can be used as a local footnote for this change.

De Beers did not take no action, but one of its steps was rather subtle.

In 2018, the company launched the Lightbox brand, and started selling lab-grown diamonds itself. The pricing strategy was deliberately set to a simple, uniform price per carat, with the intention of fixing lab-grown diamonds as "fashion accessories" and drawing a clear line between them and natural diamonds. However, the feedback from the market was the opposite: the industry leader personally endorsed the substitute, and conveniently provided it with an open pricing scale. This business shrank and exited in 2024.

What is more difficult is that it cannot even easily reduce production.

According to the cooperation arrangement with the Botswana side, the output is not entirely decided by London. In the second quarter of this year, De Beers' natural rough diamond output reached 7.781 million carats, a year-on-year increase of 88%, of which Botswana's Jwaneng mine increased production by 50%, and the Orapa mine increased by 241%. However, in the same period, combined sales revenue fell from 1.185 billion USD to 665 million USD, almost halved, and the average rough diamond price fell 32% year-on-year to 105 USD per carat. More diamonds are mined, but less revenue is generated, and prices are lower. The company itself also acknowledged that non-mined diamonds are continuing to impact the demand for natural diamonds.

The path on the books is therefore very straightforward. At the end of 2023, Anglo American's book value of De Beers was still 9.2 billion USD (about 62.6 billion RMB). After three consecutive impairments in the following three years, a total of about 6.8 billion USD was written down, leaving only 2.3 billion USD, about 15.6 billion RMB, by February 2026. In 2025, De Beers' underlying EBITDA lost 511 million USD, while the figure for the previous year was only 25 million USD; in the first half of this year, it still lost 113 million USD.

As for why it is being sold right now, the answer does not lie entirely in the diamond business.

In early 2024, BHP launched an acquisition offer for Anglo American of nearly 50 billion USD. Anglo American fended off the offer, but the price was that it had to present a more streamlined asset portfolio to shareholders. After divesting coking coal and splitting the platinum business, De Beers became the last item on the list. The current sale is also a step it needs to complete before merging with Canada's Teck Resources.

The other half of the story in Zhecheng

The hand that brought down the price has a share from Henan.

There is not a single natural diamond mine in Zhecheng County, Shangqiu, but its annual output of lab-grown diamonds reaches 12 million carats. Data from the "2025 Lab-Grown Diamond Industry Development Report" shows that China's lab-grown rough diamond production capacity is about 25.2 million carats, accounting for 63% of the total global capacity — which means that Zhecheng County alone contributes nearly half of the country's total capacity. In terms of the output caliber of synthetic diamond single crystals, China's share is even higher.

Between a county and a century-old company, there is a complete industrial chain, as well as a rather unsatisfactory profit distribution.

China produces rough diamonds, India cuts and polishes them, and Europe and the United States sell them under brand labels. After the rough diamonds are transported to Surat, Gujarat, the cutting and polishing link can get a 3 to 5 times premium; then when they enter the counters of European and American brands, the terminal selling price can reach 10 to 15 times the cost of the rough diamonds. With production capacity in hand, the pricing power is not in their own hands. Several leading domestic enterprises have seen both revenue and profit decline in the past two years. The profit of Henan Liliang Diamond dropped by 80% in the first half of 2025, the main reason being the continuous decline in lab-grown diamond prices. In the first quarter of this year, the wholesale price of lab-grown diamonds still fell by 14% year-on-year, of which 3-carat round diamonds fell by 28% year-on-year, and 1-carat diamonds fell by 15%; some low-grade CVD rough diamonds quoted in the Dubai and Indian markets fell to 20 to 25 USD per carat, and loss-making shipments have appeared.

However, the story takes a turn here.

As the power consumption of a single cabinet of artificial intelligence servers continues to rise, and traditional heat dissipation methods have approached their limits, the task of "attaching an efficient heat sink to the chip" has changed from an original experimental subject to an item on the procurement list.

Therefore, people call 2026 the starting year for the large-scale application of diamond heat dissipation.

NVIDIA has begun to use the "diamond composite material + liquid cooling" heat dissipation solution in its new batch of high-end GPU products; AMD uses lab-grown diamonds as heat sink sheets in its latest AI servers; as for Intel and Qualcomm, they are conducting relevant tests and carrying out commercialization attempts. The requirements for diamonds for heat sink sheets are completely different from those for jewelry: they do not pay attention to clarity grade, cut proportion or the "eight hearts and eight arrows" effect, but only require good thermal conductivity, high purity and consistent crystals. This is exactly what the high-pressure high-temperature method and chemical vapor deposition method are good at.

For industrial clusters like Zhecheng, this is not a career change, but a track change, connecting the orders of another customer at one end of the same production line. Experience in equipment, process and yield control can be migrated. The downstream has changed from jewelry counters to server cabinets, and the once-a-year wedding season has been replaced by quarterly rolling computing power growth. Relevant companies generally adopt a two-pronged strategy: while maintaining scale on the consumer side to stabilize cash flow, they invest in R&D on the industrial side to seize the certification window period.

In the first quarter of this year, the terminal sales volume of lab-grown diamonds still maintained a double-digit growth rate, and the unit price also remained in a relatively stable state. Consumers' budgets have not changed, and they choose more carats or higher parameters within the fixed budget.

From the perspective of natural diamonds, it will take some time to complete the consumption of production and inventory. The Penney consortium includes the governments of Namibia and Angola, as well as some of the world's largest diamond merchants. Botswana holds a 15% stake and hopes to increase its shareholding. The very existence of the buyer itself indicates their intention: they are engaged in diamond trading rather than financial investment.

A carbon crystal, after being accompanied by an advertising slogan worn on the ring finger for 70 years, now its most scarce application is to be attached to the back of a GPU. By replacing the price tag with another statement, the story has a new way of being told.

This article is from WeChat Official Account "thecapital" (ID: thecapital), Author: Wang Tao, Editor: Wu Ren, 36Kr published this article with authorization.